Isolation + Convenience = Art

Saturn Parkway feels isolated, even with cars, even during the morning clamor and hustle for lane position beyond the Port Royal merge: commuter frenzy and misplaced rage; Dodge Chargers riding bumpers and Honda Civics with custom exhaust systems buzz-whining from your blindspot like cranky string trimmers; the feeling that no one sees the beauty of the growing light, soft in the treetops: everyone is sequestered in their rolling, windowed cocoons, looking at phones, eating breakfast–angry-seeming, hostile, indifferent, closed-off. I have to ignore the indifference and rage, or else my equanimity erodes–my sense of worldly equilibrium and mental poise; I feel my own rage swell. Pointless. How do people stand it?

But the isolation, I like. It’s false, of course–tens of thousands of people live in Spring Hill–but out on the nearby highways the feeling is there. Saturn Parkway and Highway 840, the two four-lane belts stretched tight across lower Williamson and upper Maury counties and forming the northern and southern perimeters of Thompson’s Station and Spring Hill, are bordered by trees and fields. Broad, shallow-sweeping hills hide the stacked and jagged subdivisions of new and newer construction; a great herd of cattle–Black Angus, presumably–snuff lazily along majestic, Middle Tennessee pastureland, idle as the sun, less than a mile from where construction cannot match demand. Driving into the area, one may not realize that they enter a place where population has outstripped infrastructure, where roads do not accommodate traffic.

The isolation may be false, but its effect on the mind is not. Yet it’s a tricky thing–we Spring Hillians have the option, while driving home from work, to either dwell on this imaginary isolation or remind ourselves that civilization lies just beyond the trees. I doubt that many people think about this at all, actually. I’m a weirdo that has to have a slant way of seeing things, an ethereal territory on which to plant my mind, or else a place will never be a real place for me. When we moved from Nashville’s urbs to its suburbs, I needed to find something about Spring Hill in which to root my imagination–a milieu of my own. Nashville was rich with it; stories dripped from every brick. But what did Spring Hill have? So far I’ve landed on isolation, albeit an isolation with modern conveniences. And isolation can be a welcome thing for an artist.

I wonder what other territories Spring Hill will present. Meanwhile, we’re building one of our own with flowers, trees, and playground equipment. And I’m wallowing in artistic isolation, which is the good kind.